Global Asia:
Mobility, Territory, and Imperial Modernity
Intro 1
People on the move have made and remade human environments for millennia, by seeking, finding, and building places to call home, raising borders around cultures and peoples, investing in territory to include all kinds of things that travel with people on the move, transforming and demolishing old habitats, and moving on. As the scale of mobility has increased, over centuries, so has the scale and intensity of territorial control. That dynamic interaction continues to unsettle and reconfigure historical space, and has always been powerful in Asia, travelling around steppes and seas, from ancient times, then circling the globe, after 1500. The histories of Global Asia that we explore in this book serve to illuminate the contingent temporality of those borders on maps that separate spaces and places of all shapes and sizes to conceal the mobility of historical space transforming the world we live in. [Intro 2]